11 June 2017

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Summary from Goodreads:
From the bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”

In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her own past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

I have been WAITING AND WAITING for this book.  A new Roxane Gay collections of essays/memoir.  Give it to me now.

I don't think I can write anything coherent. Roxane's book is beautiful and gutting, full of sharp cultural criticism about how large bodies (fat people, particularly fat women) are perceived running parallel to an account of her life After and how broken she became. I don't know how she found the courage to cut this book free from her mind and allow us to read it but she did. It had to be so hard because I felt physical pain in my chest while I was reading it.  I am in awe of her strength.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss. I'll buy it, too, probably.

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